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The training effect can be enhanced when trainees/learners interact with real-world environments and construct personal knowledge from those direct experiences. Leveraging such experiential learning strategies for occupational training has been widely discussed due to its effectiveness. The construction industry has also been focusing on experiential safety training to address the limitations in conventional classroom-based training, such as passive learning and limited interaction with actual physical hazards. Recently, government organizations and construction companies have started to operate safety training facilities, where trainees can physically experience the negative consequences of unsafe behaviors (without actual injuries). Although the effect of experiential safety training at those facilities has been anecdotally noted, no study has empirically investigated its effectiveness in enhancing trainees’ risk perception toward unsafe behaviors. To this end, this study examined the effectiveness of experiential safety training in enhancing construction managers’ risk perception toward workers’ unsafe behaviors and their intention to stop workers from working in dangerous situations. The results, based on answers to survey questions showing scene images of unsafe behavior related to the risk of a fall, show that construction managers who participated in experiential safety training perceived a higher risk regarding workers’ unsafe behaviors in less obviously risky situations, and exhibited a stronger intention to immediately stop workers from working in subtly unsafe conditions. This study contributes empirical evidence about the effectiveness of experiential safety training at safety training centers, thereby promoting the wide adoption of experiential safety training and advancing safety engineering and management strategies in the construction industry. 

Habituation to signals that warn of a potential danger in high-risk work environments is a critical causal factor of workplace accidents. Such habituation is hard to measure in a real-world setting, and no existing intervention can effectively curb it. Here, we present a protocol to enhance workers’ sensory responses to frequently encountered warnings at workplaces using a virtual-reality-based behavioral intervention. We describe steps for performing a virtual reality experiment and an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment with human participants. 

Accidents readily occur when workers are not attentive to the hazards of their work. For some professionals, such as workers in the construction and mining industry, exposure to workplace hazards occurs on a daily basis. Such repetitive exposure to workplace hazards poses unique challenges for the attention of workers. This review explores how, in the absence of negative consequences, repetitive exposure to hazards decreases attention to them. Recommendations, informed by the science of attention, suggest how to combat the tendency to ignore frequently-exposed hazards and restore worker vigilance, thereby reducing the frequency of workplace accidents. Experiential training incorporating virtual reality holds some promise. 

Electrocution is one of the major causes of fatalities in the construction industry. Despite periodic safety training aimed at retaining workers’ vigilance (i.e., sustained attention) to electrical hazards, workers tend to fail to maintain vigilance toward frequent encounters with electrical hazards. Providing an effective intervention that restores workers’ vigilance is thus critical to reducing electrocution accidents. To this end, this study proposes a Virtual Reality (VR) safety training environment that exposes workers to repeated electrical hazards and simulates an electrocution accident when workers come in contact with the hazards. A pilot experiment was conducted, and participants’ vigilance (i.e., eye fixations on the hazard) was measured using eye-tracking sensors. The results reveal the potential effect of experiencing VR-simulated electrocution on enhancing workers’ vigilance to electrical hazards. The outcomes of this study will lay the foundation for further studies to employ VR as a safety training environment that allows workers to experience a simulated electrocution, thereby contributing to a potential reduction in fatal electrocutions.